Op-Ed Columnist

Bring On the Seinfeld Congress

Published: November 14, 2006

I’m afraid the election results still haven’t registered in Washington. Democrats and Republicans keep making noises about working together to accomplish great things. But that’s not what Americans voted for. They voted for gridlock.

"At least, one hopes, he won't be behind the TimesSelect firewall any more, and he's definitely trading up by moving back to NYC. ..."

They gave Congress a Seinfeld mandate to do nothing. The Democrats offered no bold new ideas, and they were rewarded with victory. Voters would like them to mop up the messes made by Republicans, but that’s it. Find a way out of Iraq, and then avoid any more excellent adventures dreamed up by neoconservatives.

Besides Iraq, the big issue bothering voters was corruption, and the best way to appease them is by working less. The fewer favors you hand out, the fewer chances to sell your vote. The smartest political move for either party would be to take a vow of abstinence by outlawing earmarks.

It’s traditional in Washington to measure a Congress’s success by the number of bills it passes, but that’s only because of all the lobbyists, lawyers and journalists whose livelihoods depend on quantity, not quality. A do-nothing Congress is bad for the local economy.

But it’s fine for the rest of the country. The prospect of gridlock has been welcomed, as usual, on Wall Street. The brief era of fiscal responsibility in Washington in the 1990s occurred only because a Democratic president and a Republican Congress couldn’t agree on how to spend the surplus.

The most successful legislation of the past decade was welfare reform, which essentially repealed the damage of the do-something Congresses of the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the legislative “victories” of President Bush’s first term — like the No Child Left Behind Act and the prescription drug benefit — have turned out to be expensive mistakes.

Some Democrats say they’d like to expand these programs, but they’ve been vague about how to pay for them — and loath to talk about raising taxes. In fact, they’ve said one of their first priorities is cutting taxes. They want to reduce the impact of the alternative minimum tax, which hurts people making between $100,000 and $500,000 per year, especially ones living in areas with high local taxes.

But these victims are concentrated in blue states, the very places that keep electing senators who denounce “tax cuts for the rich.” Why should Republicans agree to give affluent Democratic voters a tax break? Grant them their wish for social justice. If Republicans do nothing, the alternative minimum tax will gradually hit more and more people, bringing America closer to the flat-tax system favored by Republican economists.

If House Republicans heed the election results — and polls showing that most Americans want the federal government to do less — they’ll elect Mike Pence of Indiana as their new leader. He’s got the fiscal do-nothing credentials, having voted against Bush’s expensive Medicare and education reforms.

He has also avoided the Republicans’ losing strategy of bashing immigrants. Instead of just trying to seal the border, he has proposed letting immigrants enter legally if there are jobs waiting for them. With him in charge, Republicans could work out a deal with Democrats to undo Congress’s past mistakes and let market forces, not rigid quotas, determine who enters America.

It’s always possible, of course, that Democrats and Republicans could agree on some radical new venture. I still like to fantasize about a grand bargain on global warming: the Republicans support a carbon tax, and the Democrats agree to refund all the revenue into new personal retirement accounts for Social Security recipients. But I’m not expecting to see them make that deal any time soon.

Whatever they do the next two years, I won’t be here to kick them around. This is my last column on the Op-Ed page. I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years in Washington, but one election cycle is enough. I’m returning full time to the subject and the city closest to my heart: science and New York. I’ll be writing a column and a blog for the Science Times section.

I hate to abandon my libertarian comrades here fighting in the belly of the beast, but this is the right moment to leave. After six years of libertarians reluctantly electing Republicans as the lesser of two evils, we’ve finally had enough. We’ve voted out big-government conservatism, and the result is the happy state of gridlock. For now, our work is done. See you in January in a new column on a new page.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 14, 2006, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Bring On The Seinfeld Congress.